Google Gear: All aboard the AdSense express

In early 2004 part of the AdSense team had an offsite in New York City where these excellent shirts were distributed. AFC = AdSense for Content.

While I don't recall much of what was discussed (it was a few days before my wedding), we did check out De La Guarda (crazy acrobats meets Rent).

Batman for the finish

Oh caped crusader, you did it for me again. Was it your complex vigilante tendencies or the menagerie of villains? Who knows but at least this graphic novel delivered the goods (more so than this one and that one).

Google Gear: Little effort, high reward

From a purely functional perspective, this might be my favorite piece of Google clothing. A lightweight black zip jacket.

I think it just magically appeared on my desk for helping out with some recruiting event.

I (heart) Caterina

Every time i read something like this from Caterina Fake it makes me wish she was working with us. Such a credible, smart voice. Even when i don't agree, i respect.

And i recently found out she also went to Vassar so we're sisters.

Do you have a coach in your life?

"Coaching is making players do what they don't want to do so that they can become what they want to become."

- NY Giants head coach Tom Coughlin in response to retiring running back Tiki Barber's claims that Coughlin's tough practice regimen helped was a factor in his decision to leave the game

Google Gear: YouTube Fleeced

YouTubers didn't know what quite to expect at last month's first local TGIF (the end of week all-hands meetings that Google runs). Turns out it followed the standard Google style - founders give update, note accomplishments of week, open the floor for Q&A - just sub in Chad and Steve for Larry and Sergey.

Everyone then learned of another periodic TGIF tradition - the mad rush to get some new t-shirt or other garment being distributed. This time it was a lightweight fleece pullover in red, green or blue.

Google Gear: An Army in Primary Colors

Continuing the "Google Gear associated with CES" stories, here's a long sleeve t-shirt that us booth babes, err staffers, were given to wear. They came in red, blue, green and yellow, each corresponding to a specific section -- mobile, search, community and, uh, hmm, maybe media, i don't really remember.

Google traditionally doesn't do the "big booth thing" and I was kinda surprised by our presence here. It's probably because we displayed at a Digital Life conference in NYC and there was some sunk cost is getting the booth built. Anyway, it was neat with giant Lego pieces.

Water is the New Oil

If you believe articles like this one you might want to go long this Water ETF (PHO). I bought in last fall and it's up a bit more than the Dow Jones Industrial Average since then.

Global Warming Could Make Faucets Run Dry

Second Life: Do you fire your first customers?

Insightful article in today's LATimes (behind registration) about some early members of the Second Life community becoming disenchanted with the growing virtual world. From the article:

Utopias never live up to their aspirations, even in the virtual world, and the more passionate will keep looking. "We all go from anticipation to anticipation," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley futurist.

Would you believe me if I said this disenchantment is actually a hallmark of success? Philip and I used to talk about the role of '3D true believers,' those folks who immediately rushed into Second Life because it was exactly what they'd been seeking after years of almost-viable user-created experiences. Obviously these people were (and are) really important to the community - they were the first ones to push the platform to its limits. But at the same time they are clearly not indicative of the average user -- on the whole this folks were more creative, more sensitive and more quirky than most niches of consumers.

In the end, it becomes the classic power-user vs common-user issue. When prioritizing features do you put more icing on the cake for your most vocal 5%, try to figure out how to get the other 95% happier, or design for the n+1 user (the next person to user your system)?

Lots of this has to do with what part of the lifecycle your product is experiencing. Second Life is still undergoing organic growth where the number of people who have logged in is far dwarfed by those who have not but might be interested. IMHO they're in the "focus on the other 95%" portion of their development. And this means you're gonna disappoint the 5% sometimes. But that's okay.

Now what if some of them get so disenchanted they leave? I actually think that's natural. A world like Second Life needs to be sustained by the scalable experiences of many, not just the dreams of a few.

Will Wright on Second Life

Will Wright is a long time friend of Second Life via multiple points of connection. In the latest issue he gives a long interview about his upcoming game Spore and touches on Second Life. Here are some interesting quotations with my comments:

Most forms of entertainment don't get that kind of gestation period ordinarily. It has to be at least five years. And all of a sudden my daughter said to me, "Say, have you heard about this Second Life thing?"
WW: Yeah, it's probably more like six or seven years… I think the first version launched in 2001. And the important part of that development wasn't so much what Linden Labs did, it was the user community. In fact they were very careful to nurture the right of user community and it took them three or four years to do that, and then the community were really the ones who grew it from that point.

>> HW: Our internal estimates were 4-7 years until the community hit critical mass. A "game" doesn't have that luxury, especially when it's packaged software that only gets shelf-space for a limited amount of time. We actually went alpha in 2002, not 2001.

So what we need now is to be able to bring your Spore creature into Second Life.
WW: Well really, they're both tools-based, so it's a matter of can we create lower and lower function tools for people in those environments to use to then create a collective experience.

>> HW: At the lowest common denominator level it's just skinning a Second Life avatar to look like a Spore creature. Carrying over the attributes properties of that creature, especially relative to other creatures, is what's most challenging in the general purpose SL environment where these things aren't hard-coded -- i.e. if you wanted to support the notion that Spore A was built to fly higher than Spore B and this should maintained in SL.

Google Gear: Packin' Heat

From Larry Page's 2006 CES Keynote comes the Google Pack Fanny Pack. Get it - it's literally a pack. And it promotes Google Pack.

Some might insist this is a shoulder bag or maybe even a "rucksack." Don't kid yourself, it's a fanny pack. You wear this and you might as well strap on the sandals and socks too.

I believe it came stuffed with a small wooden puzzle and maybe some other swag.

Dress Up Like You Mean It

Nerd Alert - I'm totally going to the WonderCon Comic Book convention in San Francisco the first weekend in March. Why? To see people dress up like superheroes of course.

Here's Batman from when I went in 2005.

Reluctant YouTube Stars

Radar has an article on the YouTube stars who didn't aim to become popular - you know, like StarWars Kid and Afroninja.

When "Afroninja" was posted, it was viewed 80 million times—placing it roughly on par with the final episode of Cheers in terms of audience.

Google Gear: Keep movin' folks, nothing special here

While some of my garments have stories, others tell no tales. These two shirts were just random Google logo t's that came to me via the T-Shirt cabinet -- a magical place on campus periodically filled with random gear for Googlers. This mechanism has been the discussion of many email threads about proper etiquette and efficiency for optimal t-shirt distribution.

Google Gear: The IPO Hat?

Every summer Google has a Family Picnic -- it's like an outdoor version of our Holiday Party except kid friendly - lots of activities, food, etc.

In 2004 the annual picnic was coincidentally just after our IPO which lead some reporters to believe it was a celebration tied to the event. Not true -- to most of us the IPO was a pretty cool day, but not something to celebrate. We just wanted to get back to work -- I mean there were so many news crews around, more than I'd ever seen without the chalk outline of a crime scene.

Oh yeah, and this hat - they gave out hats at the picnic :)

Take a lick of Colbert

Best. Brand. Extension. Ever.

Sim a Song: Part 2

When EA acquired SingShot i posted about their new Sims plans for an online casual world. Now, Marketing Week reports similar.

I've met Bing Gordon, EA Founder and creative visionary, a few times. He had a great statement about the future prospects of virtual environments (paraphrasing): "Online worlds will become part of every teenager's life because of the ability to try on different personas."

Think that's a market they're interested in? Yup.

Google Gear: Always looking for talent

This particular one says "talent scout" on the back, simultaneously thanking me for referring many job applicants to google and also making the shirt embarrassingly unwearable.

We famously get hundreds of thousands of resumes a month but still we're hungry for new recruits. As a product manager helping to grow the team is a high priority - # interviews and # referrals are factored into our performance scores. There's also a small monetary incentive if your referral gets hired but given the rejection rate i think this bonus is likely 1/10th of what it actually should be. I've gotten two people hired with well over 50 referrals.

So if you want to work here just check out our Jobs page and let me know.

Because you know they all look alike

Not quite "Barack Osama" but come on people, get your facts right (via NYTimes):

A review of the concert film ''Fade to Black'' in Weekend yesterday misidentified a star appearing in the film with the rapper Jay-Z. She was Foxy Brown, not Lil' Kim. Because of an editing error, a picture caption misidentified the singer dressed all in white. He was R. Kelly, not Jay-Z.

will.i.am and hunter i be

Spent an hour today with will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas and came away very impressed. Will's a bit of a geek - he loves the technology, aiming it at empowering artists and youth. And when a guy with a cool moniker like will.i.am says the "hunter walk" is a very strong name, well, i just gotta thanks my parents for that.

Sim a Song

Electronic Arts bought SingShot, an online karaoke site. Let me tell you what they're doing - building a next generation version of The Sims Online which is more reliant upon user content and socializing than the ill-fated first effort. It's in-development now and I'm fairly certain this will be part of that product.

James Hong = Really Kicking Ass

As James Hong reengages in Hot or Not, his blog posts have really been kicking ass. Today's was about entrepreneurial hunger -- James projects the type of leadership required to birth and sustain companies.

People sometimes disregard James because Hot or Not is a simple concept and they've milked it for several years as a cash cow. I'm thinking people will start to see more dimensions from James in the coming months and his blog already reflects this.

Seth Shears Sheepwalking

Seth Godin blogs about 'sheepwalking,' which he calls the "outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line."

He mentions Google, not in the good way: "I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minuted) Google salesreps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking."

Now I can't really comment one way or another on the conversations that Seth had with my fellow Googlers, but it resonated with me from a hiring discussion I had last year. My concern was with "blockers and tacklers" - those who do the job but are unlikely to write new plays into the playbook.

If a company finds itself hiring more "B&Ts" (which I'll generously define as people who are quite capable of doing their job but not interested in changing the status quo) at the very least it should hire some freaks at the fringes. I figure I've got two strategies at Google - either I can try to push us to not hire B&Ts or I can campaign to take risks with folks who will help us continue to push the boundaries. I'm kind of doing both but informally via my own interview feedback on candidates.

Etsy frustrate-sy

Etsy you are killing me. I want to use your Alchemy service to put out some requests for craft items to be made for me, but it's been down for weeks and all I get is a lame error page. How about an email notifier option (or feed) to let me know when it's back up?

Google Gear: Dance Dance Revolution

The Google Dance is our annual party for webmasters, SEOs, SEMs, and basically anyone attending the annual WebMasterWorld conference in San Jose. The event itself is named for the process by which Google periodically makes a set of changes to our ranking algorithm and the associated changes to our idenx.

2004 was my first year attending - the shirts are always a big hit so I've foregone the last two because of long lines. Best one was still 2003's "Do the Robot."

Google Gear: What, that's not a Google shirt!

Apparently when you buy a company you really do get all their assets, including the shirts off their back. A few years ago Google acquired Sprinks, a competing ad network.

Shortly thereafter some random boxes of Sprinks promotional gear showed up.

WiFi almost did SL in

There's a Second Life cover story in today's USA Today that mentions an interesting aspect of our development previously not covered before - the challenges created by consumer movement from desktops to laptops.

In the early days, we were modeling a number of assumptions relevant to our adoption and addressable base. Consumer broadband was the big one, followed by graphics cards. I was keeper of these charts and with each new Dell catalog, would excitedly benchmark what $500, $750 and $1000+ could buy. We needed the entry level PC to run us out of the box. It was happening too -- desktop prices were falling quickly and with the exception of enterprise models (which often left out a graphics card to save $), every new computer was shipping with solid technology to run SL at reasonable levels.

Then WiFi started getting hot and laptops became the new PC of choice faster than we, or analysts, had predicted.

These notebooks were powerful enough to run most applications but 12-18 mths behind in terms of processor and graphics cards. D'oh! We hoped that these notebooks would become the second computer in a household, but instead they started to serve dual purposes as both an office and portable device. We were in danger of missing a hardware upgrade cycle, especially troubling because these new laptops were disproportionately being purchased by a younger demographic and web creatives, target markets for SL.

As the article notes, "that wait severely tested Linden Lab's financial reserves" and was one of the factors in the 2003 cash crunch.

Google Gear: AdSense Turns One!

One common theme on Google Gear is the use of our red, blue, yellow, green colors. It's a dead giveaway even when the Google logo isn't front and center. Here's one AdSense milestone shirt (i think the one year anniversary) with the AdSense puppy.

Google Gear: The day webmail changed forever

Next piece of google clothing: The Gmail launch t-shirt.

A gig of webmail storage for free sent Microsoft and Yahoo scrambling to keep up.

This shirt also taught me another important lesson: at tech companies and comic book stores, XL t-shirts are really XXXL (perhaps so the husky occupants feel a bit more svelte).

Pomelo on the rise

Increasingly attracted to people who are passionate and talented in areas far afield from my daily practices, it was with enthusiasm that we attended "Citrus Weekend" at the SF Ferry Building Farmer's Market. The highlight was a talk by the owner of Twin Girls Farm, an organic supplier of oranges, grapefruits, pomelos and other treats. Nacho, the owner, related stories of growing from a 6 1/2 acre initial stake to now over 700 acres. It was truly a family affair - named after his daughters, staffed by generations of his family and tied to his agricultural heritage. We learned about the threat of frost and what crops were on the rise. Nacho participates in over 20 farmer's markets because he loves to see people enjoying his fruit and the direct to consumer model allows for superior profits.

These educational weekends continue throughout the rest of the year at the Farmer's Market and cover a variety of topics.

NY <> SF Neighborhood Translations

Ever wonder if Pac Heights is the SF equivalent of the Upper East Side? This handy guide takes a stab at equating some of NY's hood with their sister geography in San Francisco. I've gotta disagree w/ the Noe Valley = Upper West Side - it's Park Slope no doubt.

(hat tip Susan Mernit)

DWI, DUI, DWE

Listening to Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and he cites that 19% of American meals are eaten in cars each day. I would have thought it was closer to 5%.